“No,” I said, without thinking.
“Well, it’s a classic, and tough shit,” Hoxley said. “I’ve long given up the idea that you might do anything but disappoint me. To the right, now, and watch the step.”
We’ d rounded the corner of the catering truck, and sure enough, there was a set of fold-down aluminum steps waiting for us to climb up. “Upsy-daisy,” he said, wiggling the gun between my ribs.
“Wilton,” I said. He poked me twice, hard. “Sorry,” I said, “but what happens now?”
“The end of the comedy,” he said. “Up the stairs.”
“This is a comedy?” I was already at the door.
“Comedies, as you should know from your study of literature, don’t have to be funny. They’re just stories that end happily.” He reached around me and fitted a key to the lock, the other hand pressing the gun into my back.
“But you said this was your swan song,” I said as the door swung inward.
“In,” Hoxley said, prodding me again.
“So what’s so happy?” I said, stepping inside. “You’re dead?” I heard him behind me, one foot heavier than the other. “That’s a happy ending?”
“One can get bored,” Hoxley said, pulling the door closed, “even with ecstasy. Hard to believe, but true. Hold still.” An electric light went on, and I found myself looking at a world made entirely of aluminum.
The inside of the catering truck was a single dimly lighted metallic corridor: stoves and microwaves and cooking areas to the left, a counter across the wide door at the far end, across which food would normally have been served. A wooden block bolted to one wall held ladles and long wooden-handled forks and knives, the knives positioned sharp edge out and ready for business. The counter was littered with Hoxley’s possessions, and the black trench coat was tossed into the corner behind the door. The straw-blond wig peeped out from the folds.
“Keep moving,” he said. I heard him lick his lips, a small, dry popping sound that sounded like a snake’s tongue looks. “Between the stoves,” he said. “Then turn and sit on the counter, facing back. Don’t look at me, hear?” I hesitated, and he shoved me again. “I said, hear?” His voice had taken on a tightwire shimmy, a quaver that threatened to broaden into an uncontrolled tremolo.
I said I heard and did as told, facing three quarters toward the rear of the truck. Opposite me was a line of tinted windows. Through them, in the exaggerated dusk, people drifted back and forth on business. Someone moaned in front of me, and in the darkness under the counter at the back of the truck I saw a large black plastic trash bag, two of them, actually, held together by a long spiral of fiber tape.
“You’ve met Mom,” Hoxley said, extinguishing the kerosene lamp. He emitted a burst of sound that turned out to be a laugh.
He stepped to the left. “Okay, sit on the counter. Don’t look at me. Just sit on the counter and be quiet.”
I hoisted myself up onto the counter. Around me, like cosmetics on some grand and peculiar lady’s vanity table, was an apparently random assortment of kitchen and bathroom objects: spoons, knives, heavy frying pans, soap, combs and brushes, deodorant, shaving cream and a razor, hair spray, toothpaste.
“You’ve made yourself comfortable,” I said, sneaking a peek at him.
“It seemed like fun at first,” Hoxley said without turning toward me, gazing instead at the tightly wrapped garbage bags, “like camping. And it was a nice way of getting them out. But, like everything else, it got boring.”
“I wouldn’t think you were the camping type.”
“I’m not. And, because you’re correct, you may look at me.” I did, focusing on the sweat-smeared death’s-head. His eyes were jumping like peas on a skillet.
“Imagine the Grim Reaper as a child,” Hoxley was saying as though lecturing to a class, “way too skinny to be popular, not so much ugly as odd-looking, these terrible clothes”-he looked down and plucked at his robe-“probably hand-me-downs from his uncles, the Four Horsemen. Who’s going to play with him? Too weird even for the Middle Ages.”
I couldn’t keep my eyes on his face, so I turned and gazed through the windows opposite me. Nothing seemed to be happening outside the truck.
“So what was he supposed to do with his youthful energy?” Hoxley mused. Then he coughed sharply. The muscles in my back leapt at the sound. “Auden says, ‘Human beings are creatures who can never become something without pretending to be it first,’ or something like that. I like to imagine the lonely little Reaper when he was still a black-robed tyke trying out his power, knocking on the doors of people’s huts to give them the flu or strolling solo through the woods, obliterating ant colonies with a frown.”
“You’re the Grim Reaper now?” Outside, there was no sudden posse of Canadian Mounties riding to the rescue. No Hammond in his tight suit.
“This is makeup,” he said, “remember?” I looked around to see him rub at his brow, the tight, hopeless gesture of someone with a migraine months old, and his hand spread the paint down the left side of his face, dragging his features down and sideways until he looked like a moon that had been ripped into fragments and reassembled itself amateurishly out of sheer will and gravity. The only things left in their correct places were his eyes, poisoned raisins in a botched Christmas pudding. “I’m the Gay Reaper,” he said through the smear, “or, rather, given the corrupted state of the language at present, the Happy Reaper. And it’s still boring, now that I’ve done it all. Well, almost all.” He jerked his chin at me, an abrupt upward tic. “I’ve changed my mind, turn around. You’ve tried my patience enough in the past. You don’t want to do it now.”
“What about her?” I asked, facing out the window again and gesturing in what I hoped was the direction of his mother.
“I was thinking of cooking and eating her,” Hoxley said, calming himself. “I’ve got all the equipment. How’s that for religious symbolism? Enough to win your poor little psychologist, the one I saw on TV, a second Ph. D. But I’m afraid she’d be tough. She always was tough.” He gave me the laugh again, sudden as a breaking violin string.
“Changing the subject,” he said, “it always amazes me, a society as advanced as ours is supposed to be, playing host organism to psychologists. The most pernicious of social parasites. Paying money to priests and drug dealers I can understand, we have to have some fun, but psychologists? I could outsmart my psychologist when I was ten. He sat there getting off on my aggression at eighty dollars an hour, pretending to take a note or two whenever he remembered, and I made stuff up just to keep him breathing hard. I never burned any little animals, whatever she might have told you. For one thing, I hadn’t thought of it, and for another they’re not satisfying enough.”
“Well, that’s something,” I said. “I figured every time you broke a shoelace, you set fire to a sow bug.”
“That was later,” he said, contradicting himself, “and it was just a phase, like acne. The things with exoskeletons explode, which is kind of cute, but they don’t feel it. No nerves in an exoskeleton. With mammals, all the nerves are in the skin, and that goes first. Besides, most little animals don’t have vocal cords. Vocal cords are essential.”
He paused and looked down at the gun as though he’d forgotten he was holding it. “My head hurts,” he said to the gun.
“Blow your brains out,” I suggested.
He looked up at me quickly, and I glanced away. “Mr. Used-to-Be-Clever. Your paper was really good, you know.”
“What paper?”
“ ‘Faces of God.’ I broke into Blinkins’s office one night and read it. It infuriated me. I had spots in front of my eyes. I knew how little work you’d done. You broke appointments with me, yawned when I gave you facts and even pictures, wonderful pictures, probably cranked the whole thing out the weekend before it was due. And it was better than anything I could have written. Graceful, you know? All airy and light. If I’d written it, it would have taken me months, and there would have been quotes everywhere and footnotes speckled all over the pages like someone sneezed on them with his mouth full. You didn’t even put a colon in the title. Didn’t you know that all serious academic papers have colons in the title? I’d have probably named it ‘The Faces of God: Representations of the Divine Visage in Post-Carolingian Northern Europe’ or something like that. You just called it ‘Faces of God’ and said the hell with it.”